1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a structure of a universal virtual network function manager for efficiently managing a plurality of virtual network function managers and to a method for managing a virtual network function.
2. Background Art
Network Function Virtualization (“NFV” hereinafter) refers to a technology of attempting to realize a software-based network infrastructure by separating the traditional communication equipment into hardware and software and dynamically configuring and operating the software-implemented network functions as necessary in a universal cloud infrastructure environment.
Through the NFV, many telecommunication companies, who are burdened with enormous investment and maintenance costs of network infrastructure, hope to provide flexible services to users, be free from dependency on particular network equipment manufacturers, and save capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operating expenditure (OPEX) for expensive network equipment.
Accordingly, major global telecommunication companies have found ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) NFV ISG (Industry Specification Group), which are engaged in animated discussions on requirements for NFV, framework structures, use cases and concept verification.
FIG. 1 illustrates an NFV structure provided by ETSI.
Referring to FIG. 1, the NFV structure is constituted with NFVI (NFV Infrastructure), VNF (Virtual Network Function) and MANO (Management and Orchestration).
The VNF performs a role of implementing a network function using the NFVI.
The MANO performs a role of managing virtual resources (e.g., computing resource, network resource and storage resource) and orchestrating the virtual resources.
The NFVI, which is an environment in which the VNF can be implemented, is constituted with hardware and software. Specifically, the NFVI is divided into a compute domain, a hypervisor domain and an infrastructure domain. The compute domain refers to physical hardware resources, such as compute hardware and storage hardware. The hypervisor domain refers to virtual resources, such as virtual compute and virtual storage, assigned to a virtual machine based on the physical hardware resources. Moreover, the hypervisor domain includes virtualization layers, for which an operating system such as KVM or XEN may be used. The infrastructure network domain includes a virtual network, which refers to a network assigned to a virtual machine.
With the structure of a virtual network function manager (“VNFM” hereinafter) suggested by ETSI NFV ISG, VNF and VNFM complying with a standard interface may be processed, but it is not possible to process an actually-realized specific interface of VNF. Moreover, while the current structure of VNFM can simply perform primary management of various kinds of VNFs, the actual operating conditions require that the VNFs be managed discretely according to the types, manufacturers or correlations of the VNFs.